Directionless, I feel like I've found my way

Nice title of this post, if I do say so myself.

Which I did about a week ago -- choosing to use those words, "Directionless, I'm feel like I've found my way," as the name for my first essay written for the Spiritual Naturalist Society, where I'm now a contributing writer.

You can check it out on a Society page. Or read it below.

Directionless, I feel like I’ve found my way

For thirty-five years I was on a spiritual path. 

I felt like I knew where I was going: back to God. I felt like I knew how to get there: meditate every day, have faith in the guru, follow certain moral vows. I felt like I knew what the milestones along the path were: mystical sights and sounds, along with other inner experiences.

There’s a lot of satisfaction in being on a path. 

You don’t have to think about where to go or what to do. Just take one step at a time in a well-marked direction. Associating with other people who are traveling the same way brings a sense of community.

Once my wife and I went cross-country skiing after heavy snowfalls had come to the Oregon Cascades. Starting off from a ski resort, at first the trail was easy to follow.

But when we got further around the loop some of the trail markers were covered by deep snow. Tracks were minimal. We were alone in the woods. For the first time in my life I thought, “We might be lost. The sun is setting. 

My wordless feeling… near-panic. I realized that we could be heading into a wilderness area, rather than back to the resort parking lot. All we could do was keep trekking along through mounds of pathless snow. 

When I saw two people coming towards us, I wanted to hug them. “Is the resort that way?” “Yes,” they told us, “just a little ways further.”

I’ve never forgotten the horrible feeling of being lost in dangerous territory. 

It was like having a nightmare intrude into waking consciousness. The stability of everyday life that I counted on — knowing where I was, knowing where I wanted to go, knowing how to get from here to there — had vanished.

Scary. Super-scary. 

Which emotionally wasn’t far afield from an intense fear of non-existence that has popped into my psyche at unpredictable moments. Dying is a lot like being lost. Permanently. 

Unless you have faith in a Way, a Path to a hoped-for supernatural place of eternal rest: heaven, paradise, ultimate reality, god. 

Thus just as being physically lost leads us to long for a well-marked path, so does a sense of being spiritually lost. When I decided to leave the religious group I’d belonged to for so long, those still devoted to it would say, “Brian, you’ve lost your way. You’re off The Path.”

(Yes, both in print and in tone of voice, members of this organization viewed their way as the only genuine way back to God, hence the capitalization.) 

Well, a simple realization led me to commit the supposed heresy of rejecting the spiritual course I was on: we humans create paths, nature doesn’t. 

I’m not saying that mammals, birds, fish, insects and other creatures fail to travel on well-defined routes. They do. However, only us Homo sapiens conceptualize our paths. 

More broadly speaking, we mentally embody our physical experiences. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson wrote a book about this, “Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and It’s Challenge to Western Thought.”

Conceptual structure arises from our sensorimotor experience and the neural structures that give rise to it. The very notion of “structure” in our conceptual system is characterized by such things as image schemas and motor schemas. 

This applies to Eastern thought also. My Indian guru would speak of “going within,” “ascending to higher regions,” “treading the spiritual path,” “dragged down by karmas,” and such.

As Lakoff and Johnson point out in their book, these sorts of spatial metaphors are taken to represent mental or non-physical realities. Our bodily experience leads us to see paths, higher and lower places, ascents and descents. This is how we come to understand the world philosophically: as a metaphor of embodied life.

Imagine a concept of love without physical force — that is, without attraction, electricity, magnetism — and without union, madness, illness, magic, nurturance, journeys, closeness, heat, or giving of oneself. Take away all those metaphorical ways of conceptualizing love, and there’s not a whole lot left.

What’s left is the mere literal skeleton: a lover, a beloved, feelings of love, and a relationship which has an onset and an end point. Without the conventional metaphors for love, we are left only with the skeleton, bereft of the richness of the concept. 

True enough. However, in the case of supernatural entities that almost certainly don’t exist — God, heaven, soul, and so on — removing the embodied metaphors does more than leave us with only a skeleton.

We’re down to nothing, really. Nothing, at least, that isn’t brain-based and physical. Emotions, thoughts, perceptions, imaginings, hopes, desires.

When I came to realize this, how I’d taken the very real experience of following a path in this world and accepted it as a metaphor for a theorized supernatural way-finding, the foundation of my faith started to slip away.

With a great sense of relief.

I didn’t need to worry about being lost, because I wasn’t. I didn’t need to fear being off The Path, because such didn’t exist. These notions weren’t part of objective reality, just the subjective theology I’d accepted. 

As trite as this may sound, in my current churchless state of mind I’ve become enamored of the saying, “It is what it is.” While this is a clichéd oft-heard response by members of a losing sports team after a tough loss, there’s a lot to like about the phrase. 

It reminds us that however we try to categorize, analyze, deconstruct, and systematize the universe, there’s no way of knowing if our all-too-human descriptions come close to capturing its ultimate nature.

I used to believe that it was possible to get much closer to the “truth that passeth all understanding,” if not stand spiritually right on top of it. This presumed, though, that close and far are meaningful concepts in regard to the cosmos as a whole.

Now I resonate with what Alan Watts says in his book, “Nature, Man, and Woman.”

The harsh divisions of spirit and nature, mind and body, subject and object, controller and controlled are seen more and more to be awkward conventions of language. 

These are misleading and clumsy terms for describing a world in which all events seem to be mutually interdependent — an immense complexity of subtly balanced relationships which, like an endless knot, has no loose end from which it can be untangled and put in supposed order.

No longer feeling like I need to escape the tangled web of materiality, I’m content with meandering along the intricately woven threads of existence. One moment I’m here, the next, there. 

I don’t know where I’m going until I get there. Having arrived, I’m content with not staying very long. Moving on, the absence of a path doesn’t bother me. 

I’m not even sure there is a “me” who is doing the going, the staying, the moving on. Alan Watts doesn’t think so.

The Taoist idea of naturalness… is the concrete realization that all our experiences and actions are movements of the Tao, the way of nature, the endless knot, including the very experience of being an individual, a knowing subject.

…Every movement in the endless knot is a movement of the knot, acting as a total organism, though the parts, or loops, of the knot are not looked upon as passive entities moved by the whole.

For they are parts only figuratively divided from the whole for purposes of recognition and discussion; in reality, the loops are the knot, differences within identity like the two sides of a coin, neither of which can be removed without removing the other.

Comments

[777]

Brian wrote : "Scary. Super-scary. "

I know what you talk about and I wrote about it here
about the sheer blackness I experienced doing Ramacharaka 's Hatha Yoga
exercises.

But Dear Brian , did you ever had that also during your 30 years
rssb practitioner ?

777

[Rafael de Melo Andrade]

Hi Brian, I have been reading some of your posts since I found that one about the fear of non existence and I have to say they are pretty good. I really like almost everything you write.
But there's one thing I read in your website and I am very anxious since that. It's about a book talking about the death. Since I also have experienced some times that terrible few of non existence and as I am getting older the possibility of having something after death seems to be more and more unlikely, you are one of my great hopes of changing the way I see death and eternal non existence in order that this can not affect my life anymore. I know I can´t charge you for doing this, but do you still plan to write a book about death? You can be sure it would help a lot some people like me.
Kind Regards

[Brian Hines]

Rafael, I haven't given much additional thought to writing a book about death. But I certainly can write some shorter essays about how I've come to view death. Hopefully you would find those of interest.

I've started to write monthly essays for the Spiritual Naturalistic Society. This could be a good topic for my July essay, which is due by July 16.

My general attitude is this (though naturally my attitude changes as I change and grow older). I no longer believe that I have, or am, a separate soul or self. Meaning, separate from my brain/body.

Like everything else, I am a physical entity in a physical world. I've been thrown up into existence by natural processes and laws just as everything else has.

Other beings, other animals, fear being killed, but they don't fear death. Seemingly only we humans anticipate our eventual demise and fear not-existing.

This must be because we believe that we're entitled to exist forever as a separate self or soul. But this isn't true. It is the product of the human mind's ability to imagine things that aren't real, like eternal life, heaven, and such.

I realize that these words aren't much comfort, or any comfort. Sometimes they don't even provide comfort to me. However, sometimes they do, along with a deeper experiential realization that I am nothing special -- just part of ever-changing nature, along with everything else.